Hunting Season

The Weight of Silence

There is a specific, melancholy gravity that Mel Gibson brings to the screen in his later years—a weathered, heavy presence that suggests a man who has seen too much and said too little. In *Hunting Season* (2025), director Raja Collins wisely leans into this silence, crafting a film that is less about the explosive mechanics of the survival thriller and more about the quiet, desperate spaces between violence. It is a film that asks not just how we survive, but who we become when the world forces us to stop hiding.

Collins, stepping away from the frenetic pacing often associated with the genre, employs a visual language that mirrors the isolation of his protagonists. The cinematography captures the rugged indifference of the wilderness—vast, cold, and dangerously beautiful.



The camera lingers on the textures of Bowdrie’s (Gibson) exile: the rough-hewn wood of the cabin, the mist rising off the river, the deliberate, practiced movements of a man for whom survival is a daily chore, not an adventure. This is not the glossy, high-octane action of a blockbuster; it is a muted, almost suffocating reality where every snapped twig sounds like a gunshot. The sound design is stripped back, emphasizing the natural ambience of the forest, which serves to amplify the intrusion of the chaotic violence that follows.

At the heart of the film is the fractured, tender relationship between Bowdrie and his daughter, Tag (Sofia Hublitz). Their bond is the film’s emotional anchor, a fragile thing forged in harsh conditions. Hublitz holds her own against Gibson’s imposing stillness, portraying a young woman whose innocence has been hardened by necessity. The arrival of January (Shelley Hennig), a wounded stranger washed up like flotsam from a wreckage, acts as the catalyst that shatters their precarious peace.



The subsequent conflict with the cartel, led by a menacing Jordi Mollà, feels almost inevitable—a clash between the chaotic, noisy modern world and Bowdrie’s archaic code of honor. Yet, the film struggles at times under the weight of its own restraint. The narrative, while aiming for a slow-burn tension, occasionally risks extinguishing itself entirely. There are moments where the silence feels less like artistic intent and more like a pause for breath the script didn't earn.

However, when the violence does erupt, it is jagged and unglamorous. There is no choreographed ballet of bullets here; encounters are messy, desperate, and quick. One particularly harrowing sequence involving a confrontation in the dense brush illustrates this perfectly—chaos reigns, and survival is a matter of instinct, not heroism.



Ultimately, *Hunting Season* is a film that transcends its B-movie trappings through the sheer force of its lead performance and its commitment to a somber, atmospheric tone. It is not a perfect film—it falters in pacing and occasionally leans on genre tropes—but it possesses a rugged dignity. It reminds us that for some men, the war never really ends; it just changes location. In the landscape of modern action cinema, often cluttered with CGI spectacle, Collins and Gibson offer something rarer: a portrait of a man standing his ground, not because he wants to, but because he has nowhere left to go.